The Alps boast 82 mountains over 4,000 metres in altitude… and Kilian Jornet has just climbed half of them in just seven days of pure frenzy. Considering that the fastest record for climbing them all dates back to 2008 and indicates 60 days of effort, it seems obvious that the Catalan ultra-runner is not only going to smash the record of the Italians Franco Nicolini and Diego Giovanni, but will also force future imitators to thoroughly review not only their physical condition but also their psychological strength, their technique and their logistical capacity, as well as carrying out a severe analysis of what their body will need to fuel a fully functioning and constantly advancing engine. Kilian Jornet is not a human being these days. Well, he is when he hugs his mother at the Hörnli refuge at the foot of the Matterhorn, or when he postpones a summit due to bad weather so as not to expose himself to unnecessary danger, or when he arranges a call by phone (in the middle of a ridge) from the Norwegian police to resolve a problem with his car, which is bothering him when parked in a car park that is currently under construction… The rest of the time he is a motor with legs that walks, runs, climbs and pedals, feeding his body with carefully prepared doses of energy food.
In nine days of endless sessions, Jornet has completed the 48 ‘four-thousanders’ located in Switzerland. In a day of almost 18 hours, the Catalan completed the so-called Spaghetti Tour, that is, he climbed 18 ‘four-thousanders’ in one go to accumulate 4,400 positive meters of elevation and 30 kilometers of travel.
Jornet looks almost translucent: he is pure fiber, a sharp being who has slept an average of four hours a day since he started his project in the easternmost alpine area, in Saint Moritz, pressed the start button on his stopwatch and launched into what may be his most beloved and ambitious project. When someone loves the mountains, he dreams of stuffing himself with peaks, reducing existence to a mere advance, always more, going up, going down, repeating. Eating and dining on uneven ground. Suffering, enjoying: this is the essence of Jornet, no matter how much he wants to analyze everything, to know, to understand his body, to seek out his physiological and mental limits.
In the end, it’s all a wonderful game, a childhood spent in the refuge run by his parents to which he returns with open arms. At 36 years of age, Kilian is a child again after having turned the act of running in the mountains into a business from which many (not just him) benefit. Now, he seems freer and more efficient than ever: he travels much less to be able to be with his wife and children, he competes sparingly, he trains at will, he rests without interruptions, he eats as he likes, he studies, he dreams, he values. We may be facing the most mature and complete version of the Catalan phenomenon, not only an ultra-runner, but a sublime mountain skier and mountaineer.
Today, his numbers in the Alps are these (but by the time the reader reads this, they will have grown): in nine stages he has covered a distance of 645.73 kilometres, climbed 48 four-thousanders, invested 160 hours and 34 minutes and overcome a positive gradient of 46,203 (his body will have endured almost the same negative gradient). On many days he has barely slept more than three and a half hours, although one day he treated himself to a total of seven and a half hours of sleep. Kilian does not give Kilian a break. Leaving behind Valais and its monumental concentration of four-thousanders, the Catalan recalls with emotion his last day before reaching Zinal to face the Italian and French peaks: “I was really looking forward to facing the final part of the Swiss mountains, with the Obel Gaberlhorn, the Zinalrothorn, the Bishorn and, especially, the hardest and one of the most beautiful, the Weisshorn. “I was very tired and the most technical section awaited me, which would force me to navigate carefully and make good decisions on very delicate and uneven ridge terrain. Climbing the Weisshorn was, in the end, one of the best moments of my life. I reached the summit at dusk, fluid, without feeling tired, nothing. It was very special.”
Enjoying solitude on a summit is a unique emotion, which many value as a gift of life, a moment of harmony with oneself and with the space that surrounds one. The level of emotional intensity in these cases is completely subjective, but whoever appreciates it deeply takes away a small treasure, something that nothing and no one will ever deprive them of. Something that gives meaning to many existences, however exaggerated it may sound. While he delights in squeezing his mind and body as if they were a lemon, Kilian Jornet lays, at full speed, the ethical and physiological foundations of the mountaineering of the future.
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